Want to use artificial intelligence to get insights about your business data? Discover AI Builder, Microsoft’s low-code artificial intelligence platform.
What is AI Builder?
AI Builder is Microsoft’s new artificial intelligence platform. As part of the Power Platform suite, it takes a ‘low-code’ approach, with a simple, wizard-style interface which lets you introduce real artificial intelligence into your projects without needing a serious coding background.
What can AI Builder do?
AI Builder comes with a number of ‘models’, which offer different types of AI experience:
- Text recognition: this model automatically processes text from images. This uses advanced optical character recognition (OCR) to find and read any text in photographs or scanned documents.
- Object recognition lets you train an AI to recognise specific types of objects. This could be used in inventory management, or to identify a piece of equipment which is difficult to identify by sight.
- Prediction analyses large amounts of data, discovering patterns and using that knowledge to predict the future. It can answer questions about your business data with binary options such as yes/no, true/false, pass/fail or go/no go.
- Form processing, which can quickly import data from paper or PDF documents into usable tables. Unlike other models, which require a lot of training, AI Builder only needs five example forms to create a functioning application.
- Category classification recognises the patterns in language, tagging and classifying the contents. Example applications include sentiment analysis, spam detection and correctly routing customer requests.
How do I create an app with AI Builder?
AI Builder can be accessed from the navigation pane in PowerApps Studio or Power Automate. After picking the type of model you want to use, it follows a fairly straightforward ‘wizard’-style process to get you set up.
It can, however, involve waiting a while during the ‘training’ stage. Training is the automatic process where AI Builder teaches your model how to complete the task you’re trying to accomplish.
For example, you might want to analyse multiple images to detect a specific type of object. In this case you need to show the AI builder at least fifteen examples of the object you want to identify. Or, if you’re using form processing, it needs to learn where it can find information on your example documents, and what that information is.
You can see an example on the right of a simple object-detection app, which – once the model was trained – took only a couple of minutes to create.
Once trained, your AI model can generate insights such as predictions for what might happen in the future, or a list of different objects detected in an image.
What can the app tell me?
You can use the results from your AI model across Power Platform to create solutions that meet your business needs, even if you have no coding skills. For example, you could incorporate it into Power Automate to create a flow that automatically processes documents. Or you could create an app in Power Apps that predicts supplier compliance and helps manage any problems before they occur.
How can I get AI Builder?
AI Builder is licensed as an add-on to a PowerApps, Power Automate or a Dynamics 365 license. At time of writing this is $500 per month per ‘service unit’. Microsoft provides a usage calculator to help figure out how many service units you need – one unit is roughly enough credit to process 1,000 forms.
If you think your business could benefit from AI Builder, but aren’t sure where to start, get in touch with the team at CompanyNet.
We have extensive experience delivering Power Platform projects for a range of customers and would be happy to discuss your needs.